New MacBook Pros freezing under heavy load?

Apple may have dodged the big Sandy Bridge problem with its new MacBook Pros, but it looks like it may now be experiencing some growing pains of an another sort. As evidenced by a 44-page and growing thread on Apple's official support forums, a number of users have been seeing their 15-inch and 17-inch MacBooks freeze up when they're under a heavy load -- encoding a large video file, for instance. That problem seems to be related to the laptops' new AMD graphics, as switching them to integrated-only seems to "fix" the problem for most users, although obviously at some considerably expense to performance. While Apple isn't offering much publicly at the moment, a user that spoke with customer service said that Apple seemed to be aware of the issue, and that they suggested it was a firmware or driver-related problem, and not an actual hardware issue. Unfortunately, there's still no indication as to when it might be fixed. Let us know in comments if you've run into some similar issues.